One of the traditional signs of market tops is individual investors finally succumbing to the lure of apparently easy money and pouring their savings into the stock market. In the past this dumb money flowed into equity mutual funds in general. But today it’s favoring exchange traded funds (ETFs) ...

Here is a summary of the four market valuation indicators we update on a monthly basis. The Crestmont Research P/E Ratio (more) The cyclical P/E ratio using the trailing 10-year earnings as the divisor (more) The Q Ratio, which is the total price of the market divided by its replacement cost (more...

Economic data for February provided clear indications that the global economy is experiencing a broad recovery, with the major advanced economies growing close to or even above their estimated potential growth rates. This positive macroeconomic environment is providing a tailwind for equity markets...

In the past, I’ve warned about the coming Great Wealth Transfer.  But now we need to talk about it in the present tense, because it’s here. And it will only accelerate from here on out. The Rich will get richer at the expense of everybody else. This isn’t personal. It’s simply ...

In every annual budget debate since the 1980s, one side figures out that the way to get what it wants – which is higher spending – is to frame the request in a particular, ingenious way: We have to borrow and spend way more now if we want to borrow and spend way less later. History has of course...

For more than 100 years global debt levels have been rising, and now we are potentially facing the greatest debt crisis in all of human history.  Never before have we seen such a level of debt saturation all over the planet, and pretty much everyone understands that this is going to end very, very ...

The New York Stock Exchange publishes end-of-month data for margin debt on the NYX data website, where we can also find historical data back to 1959. Let’s examine the numbers and study the relationship between margin debt and the market, using the S&P 500 as the surrogate for the latter....

Since December, I have been discussing the opportunity that existing in the potential for a rotation from the “risk-on” Trump Rally to the “risk-off” safety trade. I stated that in December we began buying these “risk off” trades based on this expectation and adding bonds, utilities, he...

A friend reached out to me today and asked me a simple question: “If the average person gets a $3000 tax refund every year and then invests the refund into the S&P 500, what would their end result look like?”  No problem. All we need to do is make a few quick assumptions. Historically, goi...

It’s impossible to predict with certainty how much more insane our financial markets will get before an inevitable correction. But my personal bet is: A lot! For my reasons why, take a few minutes to watch the chapter on bubbles below from The Crash Course. For those who haven’t seen it ...

Current stock market valuations are not sustainable.  If there is one thing that I want you to remember from this article, it is that cold, hard fact.  In 1929, 2000 and 2008, stock prices soared to absolutely absurd levels just before horrible stock market crashes.  What goes up must eventually ...

At PeakProsperity.com, we pride ourselves on providing fact-based context to breaking important events. Within 72 hours of the Japan tsunami in 2011, we had analyzed the situation and concluded with high probability that three core meltdowns had occurred at the Fukushima nuclear plant. While it took...

Last week Frank Chaparro penned an interesting note: “It looks like this bull market just won’t quit. Friday marked the 2,003rd trading day since the stock market rally began back in 2009, making it even longer than the bull market that preceded the 1929 crash. And since President Donald Trump�...

In this past weekend’s newsletter, I discussed my remembrances of the Riddler in the original Batman series and how he would pose riddles to the dynamic duo as they faced the certain demise. In that vein, I posed the following question: “IF investment success is achieved by ‘buying when others...

You’d think that by now every relevant measure of stock market overvaluation would have been converted into a chart and circulated throughout the blogosphere. But Zero Hedge has come up with a new one depicting how long the typical wage slave has to work to buy the typical stock. And – surprise ...

As discussed yesterday, the exuberance in the markets, as witnessed by the net positioning of large speculators, has reached records on both ends of the spectrum. Those extremes, combined with spiking levels of “hope” in both the financial and economic data is all too reminiscent of the past. I...